CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

due to a consulting contract, 3.2 code freeze will be early april. ideally we'd like to get an alpha out before civicon

i suspect when we'll bump the number up to 4.0 when we support drupal 7 / joomla 1.6. not sure if we'll be supporting older CMS releases as yet. We are also considering switching to a more recent PHP framework (Zend?) for the 4.0 release and potentially minimal feature additions

Most of the major features in past/future releases are sponsorship driven

lobo

I guess an interesting question here is what the D6 vs. D7 dependencies are for CiviCRM 3.x right now.

CiviCRM is platform agnostic enough to run on both Drupal 6 and on Joomla, and the architecture tends to isolate the platform dependencies pretty well.  AFAIK, the Drupal menu system (a major PITA for the 2.0 ==> 2.1 dev cycle, if I understand that right from Lobo) isn't going to change all that much D6 ==> D7.  So at least changes should be fairly isolated.

Perhaps Lobo will tell us if there's been any test work upgrading the Drupal dependent pieces of the project.  I might be interested in looking into those pieces and seeing how easy/difficult it would be to get D7 versions up and working.  If these exist and are available, it will be easier for more people to kick the tires with D7, and may also help get some of the CiviCRM-aware Drupal modules working in D7 faster.

Lobo,

I did a bit of asking on the Drupal lists as to how best to handle a system that needs to embed on both D6 and D7.  My read of the answers is that we're best off treating D6 and D7 as different "platforms" from the CiviCRM perspective.  This makes it the simplest from the Drupal perspective, since the CiviCRM build only makes available one flavor of Drupal executable -- there isn't much support or enthusiasm for supporting a Drupal module that would load in both versions.  And I think it's easiest from from CiviCRM's perspective as well, since you already have a way of managing builds.  So to create a D7 build, I'd need to:

• Add a new directory that derives from the current Drupal directory (say, Drupal7) and start porting the module signatures and APIs to D7
• Add the needed files so that CiviCRM sees the needed support for calling into a Drupal7 platform, and knows how to build tar balls from the trunk.

At the minimum, I'll figure out pretty fast if this can be supported without touching the non-platform specific pieces of CiviCRM.  I'm hoping it can, since the menu system probably hasn't changed substantially between D6 and D7, making the job a lot easier.

If you're willing to deal with that kind of approach, I'll make this stuff available to other folks who want to try it.  Then it's possible for people to try out a "unsupported" CiviCRM build, and we can get some experience with using CiviCRM under D7.  It will also help people interested in getting CCK support and similar modules working earlier, since they can concentrate on the CCK specific stuff rather than have to grapple with general D7 support as well.